As a company proprietor for over a decade, I rely on software and automation to improve operations and provide results. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene couple of years back, it certainly caught my attention What Kind of Software Is GoHighLevel.
The concept was appealing– an all-in-one client monitoring system with marketing, sales, and service tools integrated with each other. As a business owner always wanting to simplify and scale my organization, it appeared like a dream happened on paper. Who wouldn’t want a single solution that does it all?
However in this extensive GoHighLevel testimonial, I’ll take you inside my tragic journey of attempting (and failing) to switch to this preferred brand-new software. You’ll discover:
If you’re thinking about whether GoHighLevel is right for your own organization requirements, ideally you can pick up from my agonizing blunders and inflated assumptions.
Spoiler: I do NOT suggest GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, start with this checklist of best CRMs rather. I use Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re trying to find a sales, marketing, and project management choice to GoHighLevel, after that below are a few we recommend.
Backstory: Why I Took Into Consideration Switching Over from Keap
To comprehend what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you require context regarding my previous setup. For over 5 years I had been happily relying upon Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to meet all my customer management and automation requirements.
I located Keap instinctive to utilize and it handled whatever I needed– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, subscription sites, and customer assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are designed to aid small companies keep their customers while adding new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with emails and messages, guaranteeing leads and clients receive the appropriate messages at the right time. Usage website and social networks types to streamline lead follow-up, and handle your growth with simple visit scheduling and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated estimating, invoicing, and payment processing, liberating your time. With Keap, small businesses can save 10 hours each week and increase income by 39%. Begin with a 14-day free trial, no credit card needed.
Why we like Keap
Keap offers a comprehensive customer partnership monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation remedy customized for local business and entrepreneurs. We appreciate Keap’s concentrate on streamlining sales processes and nurturing consumer relationships with powerful automation devices. The platform’s all-in-one approach integrates CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and job monitoring, making it specifically appealing for organizations seeking to consolidate their tech stack.
For the most part, it simply worked dependably with very little difficulty or maintenance needed. My open and click-through prices were fantastic (like 35% excellent). Automations ran smoothly without any issues.
So why on earth was I tempted to uproot my whole operational foundation from a system that worked to attempt something unverified and untested?
In hindsight I can confess I got seduced by the alarm telephone call of “shiny item syndrome”. You understand the sensation: when everybody’s speaking about a brand-new tool that will revolutionize your service … The turf commonly looks greener on the other side, and I questioned whether GoHighLevel could minimize friction points that I ‘d learned to tolerate throughout the years with Keap.
I stood up to initially, yet a few even more irritations led me to assume maybe it was time for a modification.
The Financial investment: Migrating My Firm to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I made a decision to take the plunge. I enrolled in HighLevel’s Firm plan at $297/month, investing significantly greater than the $97/month starter expense.
This had not been a decision I took lightly. I recognized switching platforms was mosting likely to need migrating all my Keap information and essentially restoring my entire technology framework from the ground up making use of every one of the GoHighLevel integrations available.
Right here’s an overview of simply a few of the effort called for:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ e-mail client documents
- Recreating loads of automations and workflows
- Moving client profiles, notes, and project information to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe invoicing integration
- Setting up landing pages, discounts, and sales funnels around once again
- Learning an entirely international UX and interface design
Done in, I invested around 30-40 tedious hours of setup job transitioning every little thing over– in addition to taking care of shed efficiency throughout the switch.
But ultimately, it was a calculated financial investment I agreed to make. I figured some short-term pain would settle with GoHighLevel offering a better long-term solution for my service, Dripify. Oh just how incorrect I was …
It just took me about a month of hands-on use to realize I had made a big error. The issues began piling up quickly, till it got to a point I had to reduce my losses and change back to Keap totally.
Allow’s go through the nightmarish problems I came across.
Safety Issues & Many Vermin
Given GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I made sure to carefully recreate each and every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These included series for onboarding brand-new email customers, onboarding new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending out event reminders, handling membership expiries and far more.
Whatever seemed to be working fine … till instantly it had not been. One morning, I woke up to discover 171 completely irrelevant emails had actually been sent out to customers who ought to NOT have obtained them. This took place 3 days in a row, with a various batch of 160 individuals every day.
I anxiously attempted troubleshooting and restoring the automation from scratch. Yet the trouble lingered.
When I frantically reached out to their support group, they slightly claimed “web server problems” were at fault. Yet this explanation didn’t make any kind of feeling, given that the mistakes continued happening each morning like clockwork unassociated to any type of downtime.
In my mind, this enormous failing was entirely undesirable and just really did not work for my company. I have thousands of contacts counting on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be entirely undependable, how could I leave mission-critical workflows and sensitive client data to their technology?
The unintuitive interface only intensified these problems …
Aggravating UX
Originating from Keap where every little thing was seamless and intuitive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve felt high and difficult.
Simple tasks like editing workflows involved digging via food selection systems that were all over the place. Trick setups were unexplainably scattered in completely different areas. Relocating between features felt disjointed or complex.
I’ll inform you what I indicate by talking about their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 separate setups panels to take care of total, individual, and product configurations. Yet for some insane factor, the web links to accessibility each of these core setups were expanded on opposite sides of the screen. What!?
As a person who values clean, thoughtful layout, this seriously frustrated me.
It strengthened that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress instead of a refined item prepared for prime-time use. Their concerns seemed concentrated on cramming in every feature imaginable, with inadequate usability as an afterthought.
And speaking of features, I soon understood the affordable price tag came with pricey concessions …
Misleading Pricing What Kind of Software Is GoHighLevel
Among GoHighLevel’s biggest marketing points is the inexpensive price for accessibility to so many features. Yet I quickly discovered this low-cost base cost was deceitful.
They nickle-and-dimed customers with erratic fees for core functionality. Instantly my bank card declarations had vague $10 costs from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it turned out, you get charged every time you send out an email via their servers. So for high volume customers, this added up to numerous dollars in unexpected expenses.
In between these per-email charges and paying additional for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “affordable” GoHighLevel registration wound up costing considerably MORE than my Keap plan.
The reduced price tag was tempting, yet just not realistic in practice. This bait-and-switch left a negative taste in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my carefully supported e-mail open rates plummet nearly overnight after switching over to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my target market engagement consistently hit 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. But once I migrated their records over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked promptly to a useless 9% open price.
No matter just how much I maximized my sending methods or attempted every fixing trick, I can hardly push open prices back into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous standards What Kind of Software Is GoHighLevel.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and emails instantly had awful engagement. The only thing I can believe that would be causing this was whatever was taking place behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a company so based on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the crippling deliverability problems, concealed charges, damaged features, and awful interface, I had lastly reached my limitation …
Why I Give up GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after migrating my agency to GoHighLevel, I knew I had made a massive blunder. The disadvantages considerably surpassed any advantages.
No software application is perfect, yet the large quantity of problems was beyond acceptable.
At the end of the day, software application boils down to trust. If I can not trust it to handle critical functions properly or believe a supplier has my best interests in mind, then it’s time to leave– even after investing significant time, money, and initiative migrating.
So I made the hard call to reverse training course and return back to Keap totally simply weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Let’s explore what I gained from this fiasco.
Trick Takeaways: What I Gained from My GoHighLevel Blunder
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as an expensive ill fortune. Yet in knowledge, it taught me a few vital lessons:
- Stick to what jobs. Don’t disturb what’s working unless something is definitively better across the board. Adjustment brings threat.
- Veterinarian asserts extensively. Marketing buzz around brand-new software application frequently covers bigger underlying flaws. Deep due persistance is crucial.
- Select simpleness over features. Properly designed devices should make your job life less complicated, not much more difficult and untidy.
- Openness develops trust. Nontransparent pricing, unethical reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade issues ruins count on.
- Seek honest evaluations. Delighted support evaluates suggest much less if excessive issues indicate poor total usability.
- Excellence is impossible. No single remedy can completely meet every special business demand. Discover the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over change. Incremental improvements normally exceed risky wholesale reinvention of what already works fine.
Basically, I learned to be much more doubtful of “also excellent to be real” marketing cases and much less lured by the attraction of glossy new objects. The devices you utilize daily need to make trust fund through openness and performance, not slick advertising.